Crazy Love
by Aedammair
Summary: He met her the day she died and she met him the day she was born. It strikes him as Shakespearean, in a way, that they've lived their lives backwards from each other.


It's been one of my most favorite songs since I was a teenager - and I only recently realized how wonderful the lyrics are.

They belong to Moffat - the God of all things Timey Wimey.

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><p><em>I can hear her heart beat for a thousand miles<em>

_And the heavens open every time she smiles_

_And when I come to her that's where I belong_

_Yet I'm running to her like a river's song_

_-Van Morrison, "Crazy Love"_

Sometimes, when time has slowed and he's stopped running long enough to catch up with himself, he'll think back to that first moment he met her. Not when she was a child, shiny and new and so very much her mother and father, or even when she was Mels and brown skinned with eyes he'd recognize anywhere, but instead as the wizened Professor River Song. He'll think of how she looked at him with love in her face and how he didn't know who she was and he'll smile, sadly, at the memory of her sitting in that chair.

_Spoilers._

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><p>He met her the day she died and she met him the day she was born.<p>

It strikes him as Shakespearean, in a way, that they've lived their lives backwards from each other, moving in different directions from a fixed point in time neither of them can truly distinguish from the rest of their moments. He watches her age, just a little at a time, but enough that he knows they're growing closer to that day.

They wake together one morning, naked and familiar, and the lines on her face – wrinkles he's cataloged since they met the second first time – match up with the lines he remembers from those last minutes spent in the Library. He smoothes the skin on her forehead, kisses her softly. His cheeks are wet, his eyes overflowing with tears he's been waiting a lifetime to cry.

She reaches out, wipes the sadness away, concern etched on her beautiful face.

"You're crying," she says.

"Bit of overwhelming joy."

It's a lie; they both know it. She curls into him, rests her forehead against his. Not for the first time, he sees her seated in a chair, a queen upon a throne.

It's the curse of a Time Lord, to see everything…to remember even more.

* * *

><p>Amy Pond – she never did accept Williams as a surname – is nearly forty, aging gracefully in green rubber gardening shoes and a large straw hat that protects her pale Scottish face from the sun. She pulls weeds from a box of lavender, her back to the doorway that leads into her bright and airy kitchen. Rory Pond – he gave up on Williams on his thirty-eighth birthday when Amy gave him a name plaque with Rory Pond engraved on it – is somewhere inside the house, his nose buried in a book or a magazine or anything else containing words.<p>

She tosses a handful of dandelion weeds over her shoulder. "You're either very late or very early," she says without turning.

He's never understood how she does that, how she knows he's there without ever needing to see him. It's been this way from the start, all those years ago when she was a child and he was an old man growing even older. He steps off the deck and makes his way to the chairs nearby where she yanks on plants and curses Mother Nature. He slumps into the nearest chair and studies her while she works. Only the barest hint of white has crept into her ginger hair. She's so much older than she was when he met her the first time, so much wiser than when he met her the second time. And yet, for all that, she's still very much the same.

"You worry me when you're quiet," she says, standing and finally leaving the weeds behind. She brushes dirt from her knees and hands, turns to look at him. He looks like a young man, but his eyes betray the age.

"Amy…" he starts, stops himself before his voice can crack. He's spent the better part of the day preparing his words, attempting to speak them inside the TARDIS without losing his way.

In true Amy Pond fashion, she saves him from himself.

She nods, once; a sharp, decisive tilt of her head up and down. She removes her gloves and joins him, sitting down in the chair beside the one he's chosen – the one her daughter always chose whenever she visited.

"You'll be there," she says and it is less a question and more a statement of fact. He nods. She quiets, her gaze focused beyond the garden. Eventually, she reaches across the short distance between them and takes his hand in hers.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm so so sorry…"

She turns to look at him, then, and her smile is both sad and joyous. She squeezes his hand tightly.

"You gave me my daughter back when the universe swallowed her whole. I saw her grow up, knew her as a woman, because of you. I spent every Wednesday and Friday night with her, drank bottles of wine with her, in this garden. We shared stories of the stars above, in this galaxy and others." Her smile widens, her grip tightens. "You have nothing to be sorry for, Doctor. Nothing at all."

He's amazed at the woman before him. "But she's gone," he says, more for himself than for Amy.

She turns her face up to the sky, tears trailing down her cheeks to dampen the cotton shirt on her shoulders. Her hat falls back to reveal her face, her beautiful face that she bequeathed to her daughter. "No one lives forever," she says. "And no one is truly gone." She squeezes his hand once more. "You taught me that."

"So I did."

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><p>She misses her mother and father, the sound of their laughter ringing through the house with the bright blue door. She misses their faces, her mother's smile and her father's eyes. She misses the way they always held her tightly just before letting her go.<p>

She misses him most of all, though; his bow ties and manic smiles and obscene number of suspenders hanging in the closet they once shared. She misses the way he'd watch her make tea, just to be sure – every time – that she was doing it just so.

She misses their bed, misses everything they had together, and even on the happiest of days, she longs to see his face, to smell his skin, and to hear his voice.

For one last time.


End file.
